Because reality is beautiful.

The purpose of market is to provide a place for the producer and consumer to form voluntary contracts. The market has no intrinsic morals and only one rule: the best deal. The producer makes supply, the consumer makes demand. Between them, and the competition of various producers to provide for various consumers, this constant desire for the best deal drives price ever downward. It rewards the most efficient producer and the most efficient consumer alike. It’s almost a kind of magic.

Market failure doesn’t refer to a total break down of the buying and selling but a break down of the magic, of the automatic best deal for everyone. It’s not discrete point, but direction the market can go. The opposite direction leads to the perfect market. It too is not a destination but a direction, the ideal by which markets are judged.

A perfect market consists of a few key principals, describing the market as a game it looks like this: (1.) Rationality of all players in the game. (2.) No hidden costs to any move. (3.) Enough players that no single one can steer the game by their behavior. (4.) something all the players want to play with [demand] (5.) Freedom to play or not play at any point (6.) No barriers to entering or leaving the game (7.) No barriers to any player about information on any other player.

How does the medical industry fail these criteria?

Rationality of all players in the game

(1.)Well, first of all, the medical consumers are highly irrational. Short term fun at the expense of long term health is not rational, yet 80% of heat disease alone is preventable. Throw in smoking, obesity, diabetes, etc, and the single greatest killer is short sightedness. In a perfect world, doctors would serve as check on this irrationality, but the fact is, doctors are over-treating (which gets people killed) because of their fear of litigation. The consumer is crazy and so is the producer.

No hidden costs to any move

(2.)The whole field is full of hidden costs. From regulations you never heard of to taxes you can’t imagine, the medical field is a minefield of hidden costs.

Enough players that no single one can steer the game by their behavior

(3.) Well, about half of the cost is payed for by one player (gov-care), and up to 70% of the remaining half is payed for by one company per area. Normally, this would be called oligopoly, but honestly, its worse than that. Because the first half is the government, its more like a oligopoly on the second half and monopoly on the first. Under normal circumstances, even if a player owns 50% of the total market, that player can rarely take away your organization’s legal right to exist, or place members of your organization under arrest. The government has what is known as a monopoly on force. Monopoly represents a market distortion. Force, on the other hand, represents the nonexistence of market. The foundation of market is people forming contracts of their free will, ie, without threat of force.

Something all the players want to play with [demand]

(4.) Demand, we’ve got. Sort of. The fact is, while doctors may not be the paragons of reason we hope, the producer side (as is typical in other industries) is better at being rational then the consumer side. If nothing else, it’s better organized. The consumer demand is health, not care. But doctors have no economic incentive to pursue health. They have need to produce care. So there is break down between the needs of the consumer and the ability of the producer to meet that need. Note, I am not saying there is a conspiracy by doctors to keep people sick. Doctors are like most people: there’s a few true saints, a few evil bastards, and lot of pretty ethical folk. But the fact is, we must relay on doctors’ moral incentive and not their economic incentive to provide us with health. Systems work better when the two incentives are the same.

Freedom to play or not play at any point

(5.) This one absolutely does not apply. Playing in this case means the freedom to form or not form voluntary contracts. If the consumer doesn’t enter the market he suffers or dies. At the same time, if the producers do not enter the market many suffer or die. Further, hospitals must provide emergency care to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. On the insurance side, insurers must provide insurance to at a loss to certain high risk people. They must by law.

No barriers to entering or leaving the game

(6.) Well, the barriers to entering the game are enormous. Lets say we want to start a tiny private practice, with very limited services. First, the price of becoming a MD is between $175K and $200K. Then, the first year cost for 1600 square foot commercial space, a receptionist and tech who makes no benefits is about $250K­. So, minimum startup cost is right around half a million dollars. Nor can hospitals simply exit the market, they provide a community service and without them people will suffer and die. Insurance is the most heavily regulated industry in the US, so even if cash on hand was not a problem the regulations would be, but in any case, and insurance company must have the cash on hand to pay out all claims if they were all called at once. The startup costs for an insurance company are in the tens of millions.

No barriers to any player about information on any other player

(7.) This is the worst. Insurance companies use hundred page contracts written legalese on purpose, to hide the information the consumer needs to know. At the same time, insurance fraud is a huge expense, because people aren’t honest with the companies either. If people are totally honest with doctors, their premium could go up. Conversely, if doctors are honest about risks with patients, the patients will simply go to another doctor who paints a rosier picture. Again, the moral incentive is diametrically opposed to the economic one.

All in all, it’s a wonder health care is as cheap as it is. Again, I’ve hit over 1000 words, so I will post my solution(?) later. Thanks for reading all, feel free to weigh in on any of this.

Just a quick, throw away post about current events. (Health Care IV will come soon.) Ok, I don’t follow celebrity news, if fact I don’t follow celebrities at all. I’m a big believer in Cintra Wilson’s theory “Celebrity reexamined as a grotesque, crippling disease” . But I feel a need to weigh in on this one.

Miley Cyrus does not disturb me. What deeply, deeply disturbs me is what the world has done to her. She is a goddess of sexless purity. Parents make her hero to their daughters because she is pure, and clean, and good. We know that she is pure, and clean, and good because she is unsullied by any sexuality whatsoever. She has no sexual identity. Her gender exists completely in following social convention. She is the plastic, sexless ken doll of the age, to be dressed and positioned however the narrative of her sexless perfection demands.

The problem of course, is that I am describing a fictional character. This is not the flesh and blood Miley Cyrus, but the highly successful Miley Cyrus brand. Let me steal from Wikipedia here…

Careful brand management, supported by a cleverly crafted advertising campaign, can be highly successful in convincing consumers to pay remarkably high prices for products which are inherently extremely cheap to make. This concept, known as creating value, essentially consists of manipulating the projected image of the product so that the consumer sees the product as being worth the amount that the advertiser wants him/her to see, rather than a more logical valuation that comprises an aggregate of the cost of raw materials, plus the cost of manufacture, plus the cost of distribution. Modern value-creation branding-and-advertising campaigns are highly successful at inducing consumers to pay, for example, 50 dollars for a T-shirt that cost a mere 50 cents to make, or 5 dollars for a box of breakfast cereal that contains a few cents’ worth of wheat.

Ford doesn’t really have a personality. Diseny doesn’t have a personality. These are massive, multinational conglomerates. But people treat brands like people: they have personalities, values, wishes, etc. And the key to the $3.5 million per annum Miley Cyrus brand is the perverts’ idealization of childhood: A perpetual thirteen, one foot poised on childhood, one foot poised on sexuality. Perhaps Britney Spears said it best with the song “I’m not girl, not yet a woman”. Unfortunately for the Britney Spears brand, a perpetual gum chewing, curl twirling 13 year old did not appeal as much to the brand’s name sake as growing up. Britney Spears first real controversy? Her development of full breasts. She went, as most young women will, from a B cup to a C cup.

The spokes person of the brand shattered the sick fantasies of nation by having hormones. The response? Unchecked rage, which only grew worse as she committed such horrible sins having sex drive, or having adult relationships.

Back to Miley Cyrus. Her first controversy was a “topless” photo in Vanity Fair. The words “child pornography”were thrown around. Pornography has a fascinating entomology, being Greek for “Writings about whores”.

If this image is pornographic to you, you need to talk to a therapist. There is nothing sexual about this image at all. (See comment). Unless you’re a pervert. But by doing this photo, she make clear that she had intentions of becoming a woman. That at some point in the future there would a person who was experiencing sexuality instead being totally oblivious to it. And for that, all the perverts were up in arms. They wanted her to stand between girl and woman so they could desire her, but tells themselves it was a pure healthy desire. The image forced them to admit they were sexually attracted to her. And for causing that revelation, she had to become “bad”.

But the point here is Miley Cyrus’s most recent flub. SHE WAS POLE DANCING…SEE

Words like “pole dancing” “leather clad”, “provocative” “dressed like a hooker” were bandied about. Of course, the less popular version of this photo is this…

Yeah, see she wasn’t “pole dancing” she was hanging onto a pole on top of a moving cart so she wouldn’t fall off. It’s called a “stage show”. Her ability to do that, while lip syncing, dancing, smiling, and not smudging her make-up, is one of the reasons she makes a couple million a year and most of us don’t.

But the public has to do this. When ever Miley Cyrus the person (who actaully exists and has needs and desires) conflicts with Miley Cyrus the brand (which is pure fabrication to sell shitty merchandise) society at large must lose it’s pathetic little mind. Because if Miley Cyrus isn’t child anymore, she forces people to admit they are getting old and their attraction to her is a bit perverse. Thinking she is “dirty”, “slutty”, or “bad” is much easier then admitting they have problem. Miley Cyrus’s (TM) owners however, make a lot more money if this pathology is encouraged. Tellingly, the first person called in when she was accused of making child porn was not a lawyer specializing in anti-liable cases, or even a PR rep, but Disney brand consultant.

Oh, and my original thought, before this turned into a multimedia, decently researched post? Just because someone is famous, doesn’t mean they are a role model. In fact, it might just mean they’re not.

I thought this was going to be an easy post. I thought, hey, the insurance companies are a bunch a bastards, but it turns out insurance companies, while not blameless, are not quite the devils I’d thought.

Basically, health insurance is expensive because (1.) Continual, long term expenses are a really stupid thing to pay with insurance. (2.) Hospital bills are really high and require high premiums. Could insurance be improved? Certainly, but it is not the real cause of high medical bills.

So, then I went into why hospital bills are so high. Basically hospital bills are high for a few reasons. (1.) Fear of litigation, rather than litigation itself, causes a lot of unnecessary stuff to be done. (2.) Hospitals are a skilled labor intensive industry, and skilled labor is very costly. (3.) The existing socialized care costs the hospital about 15% loss off of net, or about a 40% loss off of gross. Could hospitals improve administration and information management? Certainly, but those are marginal gains compared to over-treatment and labor costs.

So, can hospitals be run cheaper? Yes. Should they be? Should is a surprising long word. Every war in history has been fought between the S and the D of should. Should implies is an ideological question, not an economic one.

So lets talk about ideology. First off, do you have a right to health care? Absolutely! You have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rights are tricky things though. The First Amendment says you have right to freedom of press. Does this mean the government has to assist you in setting up your own news network? Or merely that the government is forbidden from preventing you from doing such?

You do have a right to life. You have right to not have the government forbid you from seeking health care. You categorically, do not have the right to have them provide it for you. If you believe that health care is a right and the government must provide it, you must logically believe that government must provide printing presses to those to poor to afford them, protests marches to those to poor to organize them, and guns to those to poor to buy them. (Your first and second amendment rights, respectively.)

Clearly, your right to life means the government cannot prevent you from seeking health care, not that it must provide it. So, accepting that fairly obvious fact, what is the health care problem? The fact the health care consumer is complaining health care costs too much really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Consumer think everything cost too much. Producers think everything goes too cheap. Demand drives prices up, supply drives them down. So, what’s the problem?

Two possible ones: false expectations and market failure.

First false expectation? You are entitled to long life. Actually you’re not. No one is. Long life is combination of four things, genetics, choices, luck, and health care. You know what the leading cause of death is in the United States? Heart disease. You know why that is pathetic? BECAUSE 80% OF IT IS PREVENTABLE THROUGH LIFE STYLE CHANGE! That’s right, 80% (Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Nutrition) Over 600K people died in 2006 from heart disease, 480,000 at the end of a series of stupid ideas. Even if the US had the best health care in the world, even if by some economic miracle it was free, 20.8% of all fatalities would have happened anyway because people found health care more attractive than responsible living.

Second false expectation? The Law of Diminishing returns doesn’t apply to health. Actually it does. Moving the age of mortality from 45 to 55 takes pennies. From 55 to 65, took much more. Surgery is a risk. We choose the risk of surgery when it is lower then the risk of not having it. Unnecessary surgery means risk for no reason, and that means expense and injury. Which leads me nicely into the…

Third false expectation: Doctors will make decisions dispassionately, and never expose patients to extra risk just to cover their legal rear. Actually, doctors are people too. And the fear of litigation hangs over them like anvil on string. They order to many tests, and treat too agressively for fear of malpractice suits. Which leads finally, to the…

Forth false expectation: people are entitled to a risk free life, and are entitled to compensation when risk has consequences. No. Just plain no. Life is risk. Hospitals, treatments, etc, all have risk, and if a person is made aware of the risks and choose the course anyway, they aren’t entitled to any form of compensation.

That just leaves market failure. I try to keep my blogs under 1000 words, so I will have to write that one later.

Ok, so last blog, I looked at the insurance companies. Basically, there is large room for improvement, but I didn’t find the huge smoking gun of “THE WHOLE THING SUCKS BECAUSE OF THE INSURANCE COMPANIES” I thought I would. In fact, ultimately, premiums are high because hospital care (which premiums insure) are high.

A hospital is a business, even when it is a non-profit. If cash out exceeds cash in, like all other businesses, it fails. Right now, hospital costs are higher then they have ever been, so we would think that hospitals are making money hand over fist. Actually, not at all.

Over the last 10 years the average profit margin (the amount of economic surplus) has increased. It’s gone from (ready for this)… 4.9 to 5.2%. An oft quoted stat is that many of the most profitable hospitals are making a 20.1% profit margin. It’s true. Some of the most profitable hospitals are putting a 20% mark up on certain procedures. It’s to cover the 15% loss they take on the other ones, leaving an end of the year balance of…5%.

Why are they taking a 15% loss? Well, because Medicare, Medicaid, SCHPs, (all the gov-care) doesn’t pay the full cost. Note, this isn’t saying gov-care doesn’t pay the full charge. Think of it this way. A procedure costs the hospital $100. They bill $120 for a twenty percent markup. Private insurance pays $120. Gov-care pays whatever it can afford, usually around $85. A 15% loss means 15% below cost, but about 43% below the price.

The reason for this is the program is never given enough money to pay all the expenses it incurs. If the program was supposed to pay for 100 procedures at $1 each, and there are 140 procedures, then all the hospitals get $0.71 instead of a dollar.

Further, remember that gov-care is only about 1/3 of the number of patients, 2/3rds are private insurance, so how does the hospital not make a killing, taking 15% loss on 1/3 and getting 20% gain on 2/3rds? Because the 1/3 of people on gov-care are the most expensive patients. Despite the fact they make up only 33% of the hospital population, they make up 50% of the expenses.

Hospitals can refuse gov-care patients so why don’t they? If taking a patient on medicare meant you were going to loss 15% of the cost of care, why would hospitals take them in? Because of the Emergency Medical Treatment Act of 1986, which means, “regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay” any patient who needs emergency care must receive it.

Hospitals loss on average, about $84 per emergency room patient. Emergency rooms account for about 20% of the total cost of running a hospital. So, why have one? Because 1/7 patients who visits the ER will have a highly profitable inpatient transfer. The best way hospitals can get the profitable 2/3rds of insurance payers into inpatient surgery is through the ER doors.

What about people who don’t have insurance, and don’t qualify for gov-care and simply refuse to pay? They are very small part of hospital losses, about 3% on average.

So if, 97% of the hospital customers are paying, and half the cost is at a 15% loss, and half is at 20% profit, that doesn’t really explain why health care is so expensive. I mean, yes all the responsible people are effectively paying a 20% sales tax to the hospital to cover the portion of socialized medicine that the their income tax didn’t pay. But, 20% sales tax does not 200% overcharging make. (The cost US health care exceeds the cost of better health in many other industrialized democracies.) So what gives?

The most expensive thing in the hospital is labor. If we are serious about reducing the cost of health care, we have two very basic options. One is make labor cheaper, the other is use less of it.

What about cheaper labor? The most expensive section of hospital is ICU and 80% of the cost of ICU is labor. ICU nurses make about 46k a year. I’ve often mentioned France in this study. Nurses in France make half of what American ones do, and health care is cheaper.

As to reducing the number of hours nurses have to spend with patients, let me rip this long section from this article.

For example, if you are a Medicare recipient and you have a heart attack in a region where doctors practice less aggressive care, like Salt Lake City, your care will cost Medicare about $23,500 over the course of a year. But if you have your heart attack in a place like Los Angeles, the bill will be closer to $30,000.

The wide gulf in spending between the two cities is not because of different prices. Sure, everything costs a bit more in Los Angeles, including nurses’ salaries and the laundering of hospital linens, but not enough to account for the extra amount Medicare pays for a heart attack. The reason the same patient’s care costs more there than in Salt Lake City is that doctors and hospitals in Los Angeles tend to give their patients more tests, procedures, and surgeries, and their patients tend to spend more days in the hospital.

But here’s the important part. All that extra care in L.A. doesn’t lead to better outcomes. As it turns out, heart attack patients who receive the most care actually die at slightly higher rates than those who receive less care.

So, um, why are we doing this to our selves? Again, same article:

Why? Because doctors believe patients will be less likely to go to a lawyer if they think the doctor did everything possible—even when doing so doesn’t help the patient or causes harm…

The article puts forward the idea 50% of medical procedures are basically done to make people feel better rather than be better. That is to say, nearly half of all procedures done have no backing in reality which suggest they are necessary. At least one large portion of the problem is that lack of skepticism and respect for the scientific method exhibited by American medical consumers.

Tune in next time, when I tie the this blog and the last one together to create a cohesive solution.

I started this blog just writing down as many facts as I could about the health care system, trying to make sense of it all. The first assumption is that health insurance is the right way to pay for health care, and this leads to two problems. One, that insurance is too expensive, and two since it’s so expensive, to few people have it.

Well, I’ll begin by saying there could be serious improvement to health insurance. First off, insurance is a method of sharing risk. Everybody pays a foreseeable and affordable loss (premium) to the company, who in exchange pays unforeseeable and un-affordable loss affecting a small minority of policy holders.

I’m not sure insurance is a totally appropriate method of paying for health care in this day and age for three reasons. One, modern diagnostics, predictive methods, and techniques mean the unfordable loss is no longer unforeseeable. Two, the big three killers: hypertension, smoking, and high cholesterol, are all preventable and highly dependent upon lifestyle choices. Again, this does not meet the criterion “unforeseeable”. In fact, we could even say high treatment costs for chronic illness are so foreseeable as to be statistically unavoidable. Three, the rate of premium depends upon how expensive the policy holders un-affordable loss is to the company, and the number of policy holders who need it. In an age of 32% obesity rates (obesity exacerbates almost every chronic health condition.) that are likely to be approaching 40% in the next ten years, health care expenses don’t meet the final criterion of only a small minority experiencing an un-affordable loss.

Is insurance too expensive? Probably. Everything I mentioned above can only go one place: premium increases. Are insurance companies pushing the boundaries of ethical behavior? Probably. Is that failure of the insurance companies? Well, not exactly. People and groups have the ethics they can afford. The average health care insurance company runs a 5.5% profit margin. In a free market economy you get what you pay for. The higher the premium the better the service. The lower the premium the worse the service.

The answer to improving the insurance industry is pretty simple. Consumers need better info, with less dead weight losses to changing companies. The insurance companies need to write their contracts at a 6th grade level (Average US reading comprehension), and switching insurance providers needs to be a single sheet of paper or a phone call. However, other then codes requiring simplicity, transparency, and interchangeable standards, the industry needs to be heavily deregulated. This encourages the sort of cut-throat capitalism that makes America a land of opportunity. Also, medical saving accounts are an option. Between private capital in medical savings accounts, credit union style insurance companies, and D-regged private insurers, competition would make companies leaner.

But ultimately, we are talking about companies fighting for tenths of a percent. The cost of premiums is decided by the frequency and cost of care. Insurance companies can profitably only reduce unnecessary visits. Visits which prevent costly claims increase profitability, so a huge reduction is frequency of care is unlikely. The real cost of health care rests not on insurance companies, but upon care providers.

This case is further born out by the fact that about 1/3 of the cost of health care in the US is paid for by the Medicaid, Medicare, SCHP, and VA government plans. If the problem of cost was one of insurance alone, one would expect that there would be a significant saving to socialized health care, but analysis of the cost of gov-care versus private care show no significant reduction in price for identical procedures. The additional 5% private insurers make as profit disappears into the significantly more expert administration of the private insurers, so gov-care is not 5% cheaper.

So insurance is just a middleman, the real cost in the health care providers. Why is American medicine so expense? Supply and demand says, consumers demand will use up the supply, raising costs until producers can create more. The producers will make so much it will lower the price. The tension of supply and demand drives the price down to market equilibrium, where the consumer is paying as little as he can, and the producer is charging as much as he can. That’s the miracle of free market economy. It pushes the price to where it the lowest possible, ensuring the greatest number have access to the good. Yet in the US 100 million people are on some kind of gov-care. That’s a third of the population!

Every body needs health care, the demand is universal, so it should be decreasing supply, increasing the price, raising the incentive to enter the field which would result in increased competition. This competition would result in innovations which would increase the supply and lower the cost. For some reason, this isn’t happening. In fact, the American medical system is running so badly, that planned economies are achieving greater results with less spending, both in raw dollars and as portion of GDP. The US spends more on gov-care (Medicaid, Medicare, SCHP, VAB, etc.) than countries with fully socialized health care spend on it, to get lower rates of health for a 1/3 the per capital population. Then the 60% of Americans pay again! American private health care costs more then any other industrialized nation. France in particular stands out (!) with the average American paying over 200% more for private health care, and 75% more for gov-care, while having maintaining statistically worse health.

When planned economies are running better then capitalism, we know something is rotten in Denmark. I’ll address what later.

Religon does not create man’s ideas about himself, it is merely the repository of them. Once upon a time, it was a sin to say the earth revolved around the sun. Versus were given, heated arguments were had, probably some people died. It was an important issue to the Church not because it actually mattered, but because of the church’s fear that it was a slippery slope. But eventually, the public opinion changed. Gradually more people accepted the heloicentric view of the solar system, and the Church changed God’s mind.

No we look back and think, “Oh those silly people, good thing us Christians have well reasoned faith now, based on biblical doctrin and not silly church policies.” In the days before protestantism, CHristianity functioned much like single party state. You could have any viewpoint you wanted, as long as it existed within the Chruch. Sometimes the Church would come down on weird ideas instantly, sometimes they waited generations to cry “Heresay!” and sometimes they got accepted in to standard doctrine.

Modern, American Christianity is more like parliment then a single party. You can believe whatever you want as long as it is one parties social norm. Through an informal consensus over the years, overall doctrine is worked out by “shoe democracy”. Religion is a service, and church which produces a product no one wants, will have it’s members walk out. Churches which produce products people like have people walk in.

In one way or another, its always been this way. Here is a list of ideas that were all once seen as biblical, and are all now refuted by the bible as well. (Almost as if the Bible was hodge-podge of purposefully vauge documents which one can project almost any meaning upon through symbolism.)

The earth is the center of the universe.

Baptism for the dead

The intrinsic morality of monarchy

Anti-death penality

And let me add one more. Homosexuality in the church. It’s coming. Doctrine is all made up. People decide what they want to believe based on feelings, then find the verses they need to back it up. In another 100 years, Christians will look at people keeping homosexuals out of the church with the same disgust and horror that Christians now view racial slavery (Only 3 generations ago, defended by Christians.)

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has already announced this, in this article. Verses in the Old Testament about homosexuality will be dismissed by their context (which also says to beat children to death who habitually disrespect their parents, and that its OK to sell your kids to get out of debt.) And verses in the New Testament will be said to mean something else, and in 100 years the “new” meaning will be orthodoxy.

That’s what happened to Catholic church (why Protestantism isn’t rebellion) the Jewish law (why Christians aren’t circumcised) the heliocentric theory, divine healing, etc, etc. It’s almost like the Bible is just used to add the authority of God to whatever argument the Christian wants to win, regardless of actual content.

I’ve been so stupidly busy lately, I just can’t work up the enthusiams to write a blog. My blog passed quite a milestone while I was on hiatus, over 50,000 hits. My sucess as a blogger (I know, such success is realitive, but still it matters to me.) Has brought the danger of self censorship. I know know a lot of people who read my blog, people from places I’ve worked, friends, family, etc. and I find myself simply not speaking when I should be speaking up about somethings.

Things like sex, relgion, inequality. And I’m not. I have huge blog I would like to post about open marraige but I’m not posting yet, because like a couple post I have done, one on rape and one on child pornagraphy, its not a subject where any error in your position, or even your grammer is acceptable. If I am goin to say anything for or against such a thing, I have to very carefully plan out what i say and what I believe to make sure it isn’t bullshit.

And I just don’t have the sort of time that takes. I’m full time student again which really cuts into my blogging time, and it looks like I will be doing that for the next three years or so. I’m a bit more brittle than I would like right now, a bit edgier, and I seem to be too tired to much. My dear fans, (assuming you are out there!) I will be back, but life is a bit insensitive to my need to blog right now.

It’s come to this. This is a doll that simulates breast feeding. And people are appalled, not because electronic dolls are creepy, but because they think playing feed the baby (without a bottle) would lead little girls to have sex earlier. Um…uh…Yeah.

Hey stupid people: heads up, I hate you all.

P.S. Yes the doll is incredibly, horribly creepy, but not because breast feeding is creepy. You pervs.